Mission to Touch the Sun: Sun Burnt
Open: 8th - 17th February
Artists: Lydia Blakeley, Soohyun Choi, Charlie Godet Thomas, Marion Balac, Oliver Durcan, Paula Pinho Martins Nacif, Richard Porter, K.P.Culver , Will Kendrick . Curated by K.P.Culver & William Noel Clarke.
Mission to Touch the Sun: Sun Burnt scrutinizes the manufactured offers of the exotic that drive the travel industry. Tourism is a global economy led by peoples desire to discover dream destinations and experience the authentic. By making leisure, travel and location collide seemingly easily, this offer creates expectancy of, and the want to consume and indulge in the ‘other’.
Mission to Touch the Sun slaps the back of the sunburnt tourist, points the selfie stick in the air, and before the photo is taken says “tourism is a form of idealized escapism, presumed offer of the exotic and simulation of normality”. Tourists, in all their forms, can be negative agents of cultures because they seem to exist in a hyperreality which has been fed through privilege, entitlement and media.
Curated by K.P.Culver & William Noel Clarke, the works explore these intersections with a comical satire, cannon balling into the deep end of the plastic world of backpackers and the all-inclusive.